Duke Undergrads Compete in Global Commodity Trading Challenge

03 April 2013 3:04PM

Duke undergraduates Sam Waters ’15, Spencer Dahl ’15, Wes Koorbusch ‘15, and Jamie Patrick ’13  placed 11th in the 2013 CME Commodity Trading Challenge out of 326 teams nationally.

The four-week electronic trading competition uses a real-time professional trading platform to allow undergraduate and graduate students to trade crude oil, gold, and corn futures in a simulated trading environment. The competition educates students on techniques, real market events and challenges, while giving them a safe opportunity to practice their skills in commodity trading without risk.

Students were required to make a minimum of five trades each day or suffer a $1,000 penalty.

“Our best trade was to short gold going into the Fed minutes. Around the beginning of the year there had been comments by certain members of the Fed Board of Governors citing concerns about continued quantitative easing (QE). Our view was that the minutes would reflect those concerns and gold would sell off."

The team thought despite Bernanke's support of quantitative easing in the senate testimony, the market would be concerned about a reduction in QE, which would not bode well for gold. 

"The price action in the previous days had strongly supported a short gold view by our account so we thought the trade offered an attractive risk/reward profile. The trade worked nicely and we made a good profit on the trade.”

The CME Challenge takes place each year with teams from all over the world. This year’s competition boasted 179 schools from 25 countries.